Christmas Questions (Episode 81)

As we have just experienced the Christmas season, Brent and his son, Father Preston Sharpe, look at some of the questions people have about Christmas from the virgin birth, to Santa Claus and Christmas trees.

Transcript:

Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets, where licensed therapist, Brent and Janice Sharpe, share how you can thrive in your life, your love, and your relationships. Hello, welcome back to Life and Love Nuggets. We're glad that you're with us today, and we have another uniquely special time today with my guest. And so, I'm always happy when my son Preston, father Preston Sharpe, in from Nashville, Tennessee, is with us. We kind of try to do this every Christmas season, because you got a little bit of time in town. And so, it's, we just kind of talk about different kind of things. We, you know, last time we talked about celebration, and the importance of celebration at this season.

And we just thought we'd talk a little bit about just Christmas, okay? And I know you're going, wait a second, Christmas is over. Well, we talked in our last one about Christmas actually is a season. It goes on for 12 days. And we still, you know, by the time you're listening to this, that's probably passed. But there's still something about this season that we think is important, and there's some questions that people have. Now, one of the things I'm always fascinated about Christmas is, it is one of the times in our world where all people, if they've got any good in them, if they've got any love for others and care, it kind of comes out, you know?

Even some of the roughest people on the planet, when they think about, when they're in this season, there's something that they think about others, you know? They think about being present to somebody, or they think about stopping for somebody and helping them more. And so, something about all of this that actually has soaked through the whole of culture, which, when we understand what it is, shouldn't surprise us, but it is fascinating to me that it's the one time that people tend to think about giving, giving to special needs, giving presents, having parties, again, celebrating that we talked about. And so, what's up with this Christmas? Yeah, yeah, I mean, they call it the greatest story ever told for a reason, that there's something about this story that just has such resonance for us. It speaks to us in all of our different circumstances, all of our different backgrounds. I mean, even those who aren't Christians, they don't affirm this as a matter of faith.

They look at this story and go, this is a powerful story. Like, this is why it's told over and over again. We recently watched this animated movie, The Star, which came out a few years ago, and it's about little animals during the Christmas story. I have little kids, and we watched it together. And it's just a great story, and the whole thing is like the underdog and the underside of power and God working in unlikely kind of ways. And that's really what this story is all about. Like, all of us hope that those who are in power who are corrupt and oppressive and those who just seem to run things, that that's not the end of the story.

We all hope there's something more to that. I remember a number of years ago, I had a side job that I did of charging scooters. So if you live in a big city, you might've seen those electric scooters, Lime or Bird or all those different things. And so for a while, for extra money, I would go out late at night, load up our minivan. That's what young pastors do when they move to a new city. Support young pastors. Planted church. That's right.

I'd load up, like I could get 12 scooters and a minivan, and I'd drive and pick them up different places in the city and then go back and charge them at night. And then I'd go take them out early in the morning and drop them. And you do pretty well doing that for a while. But anyway, so I would go out and where it took me as a variety of different neighborhoods in Nashville, all over Nashville. And what I found is I would go into places that were the darkest, the places that were in the most disrepair, that you could tell they were struggling, that hadn't been taken care of in a long time. And in those places, you'd still see a string of Christmas lights. You'd still see a Christmas tree.

Businesses, homes, all kinds of different places. And what it reminded me of is everybody's longing for hope. Everybody wants that hope. Everybody has that hope, that deep thing that the world could be different and the world could be better. And so I think this story captures our imaginations. We think about Mary, this young girl who has told this good news. And then she sings this song about it, about the one who's going to overthrow rulers and lift up the lowly.

And that's a powerful thing. You think about these shepherds who are just out in the fields, like just taking care of their sheep, this very ordinary profession, and angels show up. I love that intersection of angels and shepherds. It's like heaven and earth coming together right in that moment. It's beautiful. Joseph, who I, as an adoptive father, I've always resonated with St. Joseph. And he really does nothing.

Like he receives and he obeys. Like he's part of the story, but he participates in it. But it's the good news has come to him. Story of Zachariah and Elizabeth, and I won't go into the detail of all this, but these people who have been longing for a child their whole lives, and they've gotten to be in old age, representing all of God's people who have been longing for God to speak.

And God speaks. It's a powerful story. Well, and if you look at ancient cultures, when they think about God or gods, they were always like out there, away, we don't even know. Are they mad at me? Are they, well, I guess we're in a drought, so they must be mad. Or, you know, gotta please them, or all the different kinds of things in some of the ancient worlds. And so this idea that God cares about his people and wants to come and be with his people and comes and lives among us and doesn't come as a ruler, but comes as frail, innocent, that's dependent, puts, God puts himself in a dependent relationship with a human mother.

I mean, that's just bizarre. Yes. You know, but there's something in that that's astounding, that is, oh my gosh, you gotta be kidding me. This just, it kinda upends everything. That's right. That people think about power and God and whatever. And so it's, you know, again, I think that's why it's had so much influence. That's right.

In the Gospel of Luke, and there's a few, there's the stories in Matthew, and then there's the stories in Luke of Jesus' birth. And Luke is really unique. He begins his story by telling us who the rulers of the time are. So he says, in those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree and Quirinius was governor of Syria, and he goes into all these things. And you kinda go, why all these historical details? But part of it is he's trying to say, in a world where these guys run the show, in a world where it seems like oppressed powers have the final word, in a world that seems dark and where you're under oppression, and in that world, God has spoken in a unique way and in a new way. And it's so powerful.

You know, Caesar Augustus was, his father was Julius Caesar, and he claimed, after his father died, he claimed that his father was God, was divine. Well, that made him the son of God. Also, he had helped unite the whole Roman world, so they called him the prince of peace. They called him the savior of the world because of how he brought people together. And it's in that story that Luke says, actually, do you know where true hope lies? It's not in these things that seem to run the world.

It's in this baby born in a manger. That's the good news of great joy that will be for all people. So if anybody's lived in any kind of a group, which we all do, whether it's a little village or a major country in the world, we have leaders that are all human. And regardless of how wonderful these humans are, I think about if I was over one of these, I would think that I would be considered benevolent or loving the people and so forth.

But it's hard. It's hard to be a leader. And so everybody has had some, felt like some control taken away from them, some oppression, possibly some abuse of power that they've seen. None of our homes look like the homes of these leaders. Yeah, right. And so the idea that that was the story, that this innocence, the way he even carried himself as a human, God and human, for 33 years was totally different. And it just infected the whole world. That's right.

Caesar Augustus didn't know anything about Jesus when he was born, anything about his circumstances or his family or anything like that. But within a generation, the movement would be so influential, Augustus and his successors would be trying to find a way to kill all of his followers because it was such a powerful movement. It changed the world. And it changed the world by the way of love and self-giving, not through domination or oppression. So let's talk about some of the elements of this that are, I think, for some, hard to believe. And really? Is that what the story's about, you know?

And then there's some ways that we have taken this story and celebrated this story that are different than just the birth of Jesus. We've added stuff, okay? And so what about that? I mean, we have your mother, my wonderful wife, loves this season. I mean, she's a decorator. I mean, every single room, y'all are coming to visit and gonna be with us for a while. And all the siblings, I mean, every room has some Christmas stuff in it. Yeah, sure.

I mean, it just kind of transforms the whole house, right? And we have lights outside and we have a tree that's all this bright stuff, you know? And so anyway, we're gonna talk a little bit about that. What about that, you know? I mean, that isn't necessarily even in the scriptural story, you know, in Luke. Yeah, I'm talking about a Christmas tree. So what do we do about that?

Maybe we'll talk about Santa Claus a little bit, or what's up with this guy? But what are just some of the, even with the story of Jesus coming as a baby, what are some of the things that people struggle with in this story? Yeah, well, there are a couple of historical things that might be important to point out. So one of the ways that we've received the tradition is that there was no room in the inn for Mary and Joseph. So we often picture, I remember as kids when we would go on a trip, and this was before we bought our hotels, you know, on hot wire and in all these kinds of places. Believe it or not, before cell phones.

Yeah, I know, way back, dark ages. But we would drive from hotel to hotel. And I remember you hopping out and going in and checking, what are your rates? Do you have a pool? Do you have breakfast in the morning? All this stuff, and we'd go from hotel to hotel. So I remember kind of picturing sometimes, well, maybe that's what Mary and Joseph did.

They went from room to room and no vacancy anywhere. But really, the word inn likely means somebody's, the bottom floor of somebody's house, where they would keep their animals maybe, kind of like a garage possibly. And people would live there when you needed more room, but they couldn't find any room. And then they finally found a place, is the understanding there. So that's, you know, something. We were just in Ireland. Yeah, yeah.

And to that point, there were these houses, the farmers and stuff, that half of the ground floor was like a stall. So we actually saw that there. That's cool. Yeah, and where you, you know, it was dirt floor, and then half of the bottom floor was some kind of concrete where they'd have maybe the kitchen and then maybe one bedroom down there and then have a loft above it and stuff. So I can imagine, you know, that that's, that kind of makes sense. That's right. You know, that that would be more what it looked like. Yes, totally.

And I think, yeah, that's exactly right. And then the other element that, you know, historically just, you know, sometimes we have questions about is like, okay, we think about the nativity. We have like nativity sets and they're great.

They're totally appropriate. But usually you have Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and you have shepherds, and then you have the Magi or the wise men there too. And the truth is historically, the Magi most likely came much later. Like a couple of years later. Yeah, a couple of years later. So they probably weren't all there at the same time. Now it still can be representative, that nativity of the whole story. That's beautiful.

But actually this can be cool with the church calendar, which we talked about last time. If you celebrate the church calendar, the feast of the Epiphany, which we celebrate every year on January 6th, is actually the feast where we celebrate in the Western church, the coming of the Magi. So one of the things that can be cool, especially if you have family with kids, is you can set up your nativity set on Christmas. And then throughout until January 6th, you can have the Magi get closer and closer until they're all there together on Epiphany. So that's one of the things. But the big question, the one that there's documentaries that are written about and there's Time Magazine does articles on, and you see all the time, is the question of the virgin birth or the virgin conception. And what that means is that possible, we're modern people after all, how can we possibly believe in this?

Some of the accusations towards this doctrine is that it was anti-sex or that it was anti-women. So the church kind of invented this or made this happen. And I think that is a challenge for many of us. And the challenge starts with thinking of the virgin birth as an isolated piece of doctrine. So we think of Christianity as like a list of all these different things that you have to believe. And then the virgin birth is on one of those. So what I've heard many times from people is they look at it and they go, I like all this stuff, but I have a real hard time with this one thing, as if it's kind of a piece isolated from the whole.

But if you read the story of scripture, there are miraculous births all over the place. I mean, in fact, the whole thing is with Abraham and Sarah, they're too old to have kids. The whole birth of God's people comes out of God miraculously intervening. Now we wouldn't be exactly the same as what we call a virgin birth, but God is intervening all over the place.

We see- 100 year olds. Yes, all these people. Having babies. Yes. Yeah. Isaac and Rebecca, and then you go further and you've got Samson's parents and you've got Elizabeth and Zachariah, even in the New Testament, like all the way through, there's these ways of people can't carry on the promise of the new child by themselves on their own. They can't, they're incapable, and God steps in.

And so we see that that's really the story is it's a story of grace. It's a story of when human beings can't create redemption on our own, and we can't. We need a little Christmas. We need something now. We need it to change that God steps in. So we see that precedent in the rest of the Bible. We see that as the reality of grace.

The other thing is the story of the virgin birth is really anti-patriarchal. And what I mean by that is we all know that when we read our history books that so much of society has been kind of dominated by men. Men making the decisions, running the show. And here no man is involved in the virgin birth. Mary receives, she obeys, Joseph obeys, participates in the story, but no man does this. So then the most powerful statement of human initiative that we have in this story is Mary standing up and saying this is what this means for the world in this powerful kind of way. The other thing I think we have to be careful with in the doctrine of the virgin birth is what C. S. Lewis called chronological snobbery.

That's where we can believe that we modern people just know a lot more and so we're a lot smarter. One of the things you can hear, and I've never heard somebody say it explicitly this way, but you can get the sense of, well, modern people, we know where babies come from. We know all that stuff. We know about chromosomes. We know about all these things. They didn't know about that back then. Ancient people knew where babies come from.

They knew that a virgin birth couldn't happen ordinarily. So there's that. And then the other thing that I tell people is if you think about the laws of nature, the way that things work, and if we believe as Christians that God set that up in the first place, we call God creator, not just that he created, but that he is the one who creates. And our scientists and physicists will tell us that the world is dynamic. It's not static. So even today, there's new and strange things happening in the world that we can't explain. So if God is creator, we could say he is still creating, and that means he's doing things unexpectedly beyond what we know or beyond what we could experience.

But at the end of the day, what I tell people about the virgin birth story is it's something we believe by faith. You don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to say, oh, yes, I've studied it all, and I know scientifically this is how it happened. You can't do that. This is the point of faith, believing in something that we can't yet see. Exactly. And that's why faith and certainty are actually opposites of one another.

You can't be certain of your faith. It's a risk. It's a leap. You can be confident in it, but you take a step of faith to believe in something and to trust in something. Again, it doesn't mean you have to have it figured out. It doesn't mean when you say that you believe it that you have to say, I don't have any questions about this anymore. It can sit kind of strangely with you. That's okay.

But it's something that we receive by faith. We also don't know, have to know exactly how it happened. We don't know. We can still go, I can believe in this story of grace, the story of this young woman who received the gift that God had without her own initiative or her own kind of doing this herself, and yet not exactly know how it happened.

And that's okay. That idea of certainty is kind of saying that, well, I know what God thinks, and I know how God works, and I've got it all figured out, and that's a pretty scary place to be. So we have, again, I told you, we have our household decorated, and we let it linger for a while. We leave it all up, I think, way past January 6th even, because we just let it soak, okay? But we have a tree. I mean, we have this Christmas tree, and I know it seems like in culture we kind of go in these waves where people are okay with it, and then they start, wait, where did that come from, and was that a pagan thing, and is that really okay? And can you speak to that a little bit?

The first thing we have to make peace with, and I just encourage everybody to make peace with this, is that all of our traditions are somewhat complicated. They have complicated origins, and so yes, if you go back into where a lot of people like to point to is the British Isles and the history of trees, there are pagan celebrations with lots of evergreen trees and things like that, and so a lot of times people get freaked out by that, because they go, okay, they had trees, and they had lights, and they had decorations, and they put it all up, so this was pagan celebrations, and so we've adopted our pagan celebrations into this modern world. But so many of our traditions, you have to remember that Christians for so long in so many places were minorities in the culture. They were living in a dominant culture with lots of different celebrations, and so often what the Christian communities would do is they would look at those celebrations, and they would go, that celebrates this pagan god as our source, but we know our source comes from elsewhere. Our source is not from these pagan gods. Our source is in Christ Jesus. So often they would take those practices, and they would re-understand them.

They would understand them in different ways, in ways that were in line with the biblical story and tradition. One of the ways we see this is in medieval Europe, medieval Western Europe. Now the medieval church was very complicated, as we know, and there were lots of problems with it, but they had these things called paradise plays, where they would reenact the story of the fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis chapter 3, and they were these really popular plays at the time. I heard this from a scholar named Emily Hunter McGowan. I actually heard it from her this week. They would have these paradise plays, and they would often put fruit on the trees, sometimes evergreen trees or whatever that they would celebrate, and then people started adapting that in their local context, in public squares or in their homes, and they would decorate with trees, and then they would also hang communion wafers next to the trees. So their trees became a symbol of their sin and the fall, but then also of Christ's redemption and Christ making things new.

So that's actually the modern origin of our Christmas trees, is when we look at it, we can see the cross of the fall and the cross of the cross, or the, excuse me, the tree of the fall and the tree of the cross together, side by side. So it really can be a beautiful thing. So I just encourage people, just celebrate, and don't steal other people's joy. Don't tell them, well, you know, you're celebrating pagan thing with your Christmas tree. Just celebrate. Yeah. Well, and if all people are made in the image of God, even before their full understanding of God's love for them, of what Jesus did for us and so forth, and they're even looking to a tree that is life, an evergreen tree that doesn't ever turn, lose its leaves, that's evergreen, evergreen.

Yes, that's right. Oh, that's beautiful.

It speaks to ongoing resurrection, you know, and so anyway, I just think if we can help, you know, perceive the good and what other are experiencing, you know, we, I've seen even some practices that other religions, quote religions, and I know people freak out over this a little bit, you know, but, but certain practices that they have that are God inspired, I think, you know, and even if they don't fully understand where it all came from, you know, there's, there's good, you know, and again, recognizing all people on the earth are his creation and they all are made in his image. And so there's some inspiration in them.

That's going to be good. Yes. My, my daughter came home. She's 11. She came home from middle school and she got in the car, you know, I'm, I'm a pastor, I'm a priest. And she, uh, she said, dad, dad, did you know that the candy cane is Christian? I was like, the candy cane is Christian. Yeah. I learned it in school.

She said it's red for the blood of Jesus and white because he's washed as white as snow. And it's a shepherd's hook crook when you turn it one way and it's the J for Jesus when you turn it the other way. And she was like, yeah, it's all this stuff. And it is so cool because I thought about in public school, you know, the way that they pointed to this is where that comes from. It comes from that story. And we have those opportunities, I think, especially with our children, but with anybody to go, Hey, take a look at this. It doesn't mean that the origin of everything is all pure and, you know, perfect and everything, but we can look at it and go see the hope in there.

See how that points us to our story. So then we come to Santa Claus, you know, and, um, uh, you know, many I've heard people go, well, he celebrated more than Jesus is, you know, and, uh, and if people are able to grab a hold of a guy that's giving presents to others, you know, and sees the good in all, um, you know, there's something in that, that's a good thing, even though it's a limited thing. So what are your thoughts about Santa Claus? Yeah. Well, and in my demographic right now with little kids, this, this is a conversation that parents have a lot, like, how do we talk about Santa Claus? You know, what do we do? There's a bunch of them.

They're all over the place. Yes. Yeah. They're everywhere. Yeah. Uh, and so there's, you know, that gets complicated and certain parents have different perspectives. Certain people keep the Santa thing going on.

We want to be careful if we have young listeners right now that they might need to tune out. You might need to turn this off parents, but, um, keep them Santa mythology going for as long as possible. We have some that say, no, we're not going to really tell them that we want them to know the Christmas presents came from us and all that's complicated. I don't think there's a right way to do that. I think there's a variety of different ways to do that. But what we call Santa Claus today is a mix of a few different things. One of them is we do have some Norse mythology that's come in certain figures in Norse mythology of people who were, um, these, these figures who were kind of winter, uh, people who, you know, either in some cases they bless children.

In some cases they did, they were like mean figures, horrible figures, you know, that came from Norse mythology. We also then have this figure in Christian history called St. Nicholas, St. Nicholas was known some of its legend, but I think some of the core of it is true. He was known for his giving for his generosity, for his care. He was known for defending the faith for standing up to areas at a time when it was a heretic at the time when Christianity was really kind of under threat and very fragile. And so, uh, there's this figure St. Nicholas. So we have the Norse mythology, we have St.

Nicholas, and then we have Coca-Cola. So Coca-Cola in the 20th century, the early 20th century, uh, really began to develop the picture of what we see as the modern Santa Claus. The first time we saw Santa Claus in red was in Coca-Cola branding. And so a lot of what we call Santa Claus in our mythology there is, again, Norse mythology, Christianity and consumerism all together. So what I encourage people is point to the hope and the beauty. We tell our kids the story of St. Nicholas. We talk about the reality of generosity and how the saints, including St. Nicholas, point us to what it means to give to others, which is really a rumor of the greatest story ever told.

The one who gave himself for the world. So just being able to see the good, you know, and if people don't have the full picture of understanding all of it, um, but there's yet good that we can celebrate instead of, well, that part's wrong and that part's going to have cooties or something. Yes. And what I would tell people is the world is messy. Things are complicated, but that's part of why we love the Christmas story is because God stepped into the messy and into the complicated. If this was all pristine and we had all these just perfect concrete traditions that we knew exactly where everything came from, it wouldn't be the same story because God takes on our mess. He goes into a manger.

He steps into our world and then in that world we declare this is the new King and it's good news for everybody. And it is faith. It is because of that. Yeah. It's not fact in that way. And so we crave as humans, we want to understand it all completely and God created us to be dependent creatures. We're not going to know it all.

And so being able to be at peace with that, being comfortable with that, celebrating the good that comes in people's lives during this time and season. And so now I know we could go on and talk about all these details and research behind all these kinds of things and stuff and so, but hopefully as we go into a kind of turn the page into a new year and as we have talked about the importance of celebration and being purposeful about that and then just the beauty and the wonder of this season of Christmas is that God, because of His love for you, He chose to come and be with you. Therefore He understands what you're going through. He understands the good that He has for you, the desire to bless you. He also understands this is human messy life and there's going to be some challenges. And so the wonderful thing about God coming among us is that He feels what we feel. That He can validate our reality because He knows what it feels like to be human.

And yet He always has a future hope for us. So as we go into a new year, we trust that you'll find places of peace.

Go in peace. Blessings as you go. The Life and Love Nuggets podcast is a 501c3 nonprofit and is supported by gifts from people like you. To donate, go to LifeAndLoveNuggets.com slash donate. This podcast is produced by Clayton Creative in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The content should not be considered or used for counseling, but for educational purposes only.